We children were supposed to help with the chores around the house; but as near as I can remember, each one was always afraid that he would do more than his share. I recall a story in one of our school readers, which I read when very young; it was about two brothers, a large one and a small one, and they were carrying a pail on a pole, and the larger brother deliberately shoved the pail nearer to his end, so that the heavier load would fall on him; but I am sure that this incident never happened in our family, or in any other that I ever knew.
Most home-life necessarily clusters around the mother; and so, of course, it must have been in our family. But my mother died when I was in my earlier teens, and her figure has not that clearness and distinctness that I wish it had. She seems now to have been a remarkable combination of energy and industry, of great kindness, and still of strong and controlling will; a woman who, under other conditions of life, and unhampered by so many children and such pressing needs, might have left her mark upon the world. But this was not to be; for she could not overlook the duties that lay nearest her for a broader or more ambitious life.
Both my father and mother must have been kind and gentle and tender to the large family that so sorely taxed their time and strength; and yet, as I look back, I do not have the feeling of closeness that should unite the parent and the child. They were New England people, raised in the Puritan school of life, and I fancy that they would have felt that demonstrations of affection were signs of weakness rather than of love. I have no feeling of a time when either my father or my mother took me, or any other member of our family, in their arms; and the control of the household seemed to be by such fixed rules as are ordinarily followed in family life, with now and then a resort to rather mild corporal punishment when they thought the occasion grave enough. Both parents were beyond their neighbors in education, intelligence, and strength of character; and with their breadth of view, I cannot understand how they did not see that even the mild force they used tended to cause bitterness and resentment, and thus defeat the object sought. I well remember that we were all glad if our parents, or either of them, were absent for a day; not that they were unkind, but that with them we felt restraint, and never that spirit of love and trust which ought always to be present between the parent and the child.